Rain Dance

by Steve Henderson

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Price

$6,700

Dimensions

67.000 x 30.000 x 1.500 inches

Title

Rain Dance

Artist

Steve Henderson

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

There is something about rain, especially in places that aren’t lush with plant growth, that is magical.

One doesn’t tend to associate rain with the Grand Canyon of the U.S. Southwest, although, oddly, it does receive rain and snow. It just doesn’t look like it. At the rim of the canyon, the ground is hard and rocky; the bushes and trees gnarled and tough. No lush jungle, this is a place where water, when it comes, is quickly drunk up. The pools that remain after a storm glisten like jewels.

What we would call a puddle in another place seems to deserve a better name here, a name that celebrates how precious and treasured water is.

Within this Arizona landscape, this country of rugged cliffs and nature-hewn rocks, a young woman performs an impromptu dance at the rim of the canyon. Her left arm sweeps gracefully over her head as she stands, eyes half closed, and feels the cool, rain-kissed air.

Her bare feet brush across the rocks and gravel of the hard ground, and for some reason – one we don’t quite know but are ready to accept – she is dressed as if for a concert or a dance, for a “civilized” venue as opposed to this wild landscape.

But this is where she belongs, dancing her dance of celebration to beauty, peace, silence, majesty, goodness, and nature. She is alone, strong and confident within herself, not needing to be seen by others, not desperate that her every action be validated by their approval.

Indeed, because she is confident within herself, she frequently attracts the censure of the conventional, the criticism of the fearful that she shouldn’t be so “different,” shouldn’t do things that other people don’t understand, shouldn’t behave and act and think the way she does. She doesn’t fit in.

And that’s a good thing. Like water, like glistening pools on hard, dry ground, she adds an element of the unexpected to her surroundings. Her very insistence upon freedom, upon not fitting in, is good and right and normal, something to be celebrated.

Like rain.

Featured in 42 Fine Art America groups, including 500 Views.

Uploaded

January 13th, 2021

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